Monday, May 17, 2010

FO: Law School & the Energy Hat

Saturday marked my last law school exam ever. It was evidence, a pretty basic law school class that I put off taking until the very end. With law school over, I have a couple weeks where I plan to take it easy before I start my bar review course.

I also just realized that I never posted about my finished energy law project. This is the finished hat:

The pink is not my handspun, but my professor requested that it be made for a six year girl when I talked to him about my project and I felt the pink and the flowers made it more six year girl appropriate. Hopefully it fits, the fabric turned out very thick, with little stretch to it.

In the end I calculated that this hat took me about 17 hours to spin and knit. According to my math this means I burned about 1700 calories or the equivalent of 3/50 of a gallon of oil while making the hat. This means that I used significantly less energy than a conventional piece of clothing takes. But, in full disclosure, this does not include transportation costs or energy used in processing the wool. Since I wasn't involved in these processes its difficult for me to say how much energy was expended it these processes. The trip from Vermont to me would have taken about 13 to 14 gallons on the average USPS truck but since I couldn't find an average carrying weight I wasn't sure how to divide this up between my 4 ounces of wool and everything else on the truck. As for processing I really just have no idea how much energy or time that takes, but it looks like I'm going to learn more about this process soon.

More on my impending wool processing education another time, for now I'll just enjoy not having homework to do.